Title: Requiem For A Nun
Rating: 4 Stars
Over thirty-five years ago, one day I decided to become a serious reader. I was at the university book store. I noticed that there was a set of books required for a class on William Faulkner. Having heard of Faulkner and knowing that he was one of those writers that one should read if one wishes to become well read, I bought the entire set for my own personal reading. I can’t remember all of the books now, but I’m sure that it included at least The Sound And The Fury, As I Lay Dying, and Absalom, Absalom!
I sat down and commenced to become well read. I started with The Sound And The Fury. If you’re at all familiar with it, it will come as no surprise that it promptly kicked my ass up and down the street.
Thus started my long term relationship with William Faulkner. He’s written some 19 novels, of which by now I’ve probably have read about half. Pretty much every time I’ve first read each, it administered a similar ass kicking. Several times, I’ve persevered and have re-read one of them and picked up just a bit more from it.
Not having read a Faulkner novel for several years now, at a friend’s suggestion I decided to give Requiem for a Nun a chance. It’s a sequel of sorts to Sanctuary, a somewhat sordid tale of an alcoholic grandee of Southern aristocracy named Gowan Stevens who drunkenly abandons his date, the young college student Temple Drake. Temple ends up getting raped. In the ensuing very messy aftermath, the wrong man gets convicted and lynched for the rape and Temple herself quits college and ends up working at a bordello.
Requiem for a Nun takes up some eight years later. Gowan Stevens has sworn off drink. He has done what he thinks is the courtly thing by rescuing Temple from prostitution and marrying her. They have two children. At the beginning of the novel, we learn that the children’s nursemaid, Nancy, a former drug addict and prostitute, has murdered one of their children, has been sentenced to death, and now awaits execution.
Temple, the mother of the murdered child, is trying desperately to have the governor commute Nancy’s sentence. The plot of the story, as it were, is why she is trying to save the woman that murdered her child. Being a grand Faulkner novel, you can imagine that her motives are complex and gnarled.
The novel is structured as a play in three acts. Before each act is a prologue that is a history of a specific building. The first act starts in the courthouse and Nancy hears her sentence to die. The second act starts in the state house as Temple pleads with the governor to commute Nancy’s death sentence, and the third act is in the jail house, where Temple and Nancy talk in the hours before Nancy is to die.
The prologue for each act is classic Faulkner. There are long, florid, serpentine sentences that roll on for pages. As I read them, I found myself reading them aloud because of their poetic resonance. As oftentimes happens when I read Faulkner, I find myself falling almost into a dreamlike trance as the words seem to nearly take on a hypnotic quality. I find myself coming to with a start and having to re-read entire paragraphs to pick up the thread that I’d lost.
Even though the setting of the novel is only eight years after Sanctuary, this was actually written in 1951, some twenty years later. For those who know anything at all about Faulkner, you’ll know that most of his novels take place in the fictional Mississippi county of Yoknapatawpha. This won’t be the last novel that he’ll have written with this setting, but by now he has written ten or so novels or collections over a twenty year period that have taken place there.
By this point, Faulkner must have developed a fully realized vision of Yoknapatawpha County. Here, in all of the prologues, you hear, in great detail, a full history from the initial first settlers to the current day. Several events described in previous novels are referenced. Names like Sartoris, Compson, and Sutpen, all key families that have a multi-generational presence in Yoknapatawpha County, are called out. Reading these prologues feels like some culmination that Faulkner has been working toward for decades.
For those familiar with Faulkner, his most famous quote is “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” This is a common theme across all of Faulkner’s novels. In the long and rich tragedy of Southern history, the past seems to always be whispering into the ears of those in the present.
This quote is from this novel and it especially rings true here. Both Gowan Stevens and Temple Drake are trapped by their past actions eight years ago. There can be no escape. By the end of the novel, the best that they can hope for is that they can somehow suffer along and make an uneasy peace with their shared past.
dorkenstein 